IRENA’s Support to the African Continental Power System Masterplan

IRENA organised the third, in a series of four week-long trainings, for a team of African modellers developing Africa Continental Power System Masterplan (CMP). The training was hosted in Bonn, Germany on 21 – 25 November, 2022.

African Union has launched the Africa Single Electricity Market (AfSEM). Implementation of AfSEM will be supported by the CMP initiative led by African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD). The CMP initiative includes modelling the continental masterplan together with IRENA and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as the modelling partners.

The training week was joined by more than thirty professionals consisting of AUDA-NEPAD’s CMP modelling team and representatives of four African Power Pools and North African country utilities/energy ministries, African Union Commission (AUC) and African Development Bank (AfDB). The participants learnt how to develop alternative scenarios using SPLAT-MESSAGE tool, particularly featuring different potential levels of inter-regional and continental power transmission infrastructure capacity to ensure pertinence with outcomes of prior consultations performed with African stakeholders.

The IRENA and IAEA’s MESSAGE-SPLAT tool has been chosen to perform generation and inter country transmission capacity expansion optimisation for CMP plan. To build capacity of AUDA-NEPAD’s CMP modelling team, IRENA has been organising a series of four week-long trainings. The training programme aims to equip the participants with skills to 1) develop the SPLAT-CMP model, (2) to develop CMP scenarios and analyse them, (3) to institutionalise the model maintenance process, and (4) to obtain model approval by the experts from Power Pools and future endorsement by the African Union Specialised Technical Committees.

The event was by invitation only. For any information, please contact bhussain@irena.org.